While the resulting event on Saturday proved notable for its variety of speakers and their diverse thoughts on how to both moderate and protect various kinds of online speech, it was nearly overshadowed by a frosty pall. SXSW's Online Harassment Summit is the only event in the festival's 22-year run to include a security checkpoint—which visitors had to pass through every time they re-entered its building—and its panels were introduced with reminders that unattended bags would be "confiscated and destroyed" by guards on site, no questions asked.

Further Reading

Between those issues, an overstuffed panel schedule, and the summit venue's long walk from the SXSW downtown-Austin core, the resulting event was dampened by small and thinly spread crowds. There was nothing meek about the content, however. What the Online Harassment Summit lacked in headline-grabbing conflict, it made up for with compelling voices that saw tech, policy, and academic experts finding common ground on the subject of antagonistic and threatening online speech. At its best, the results included informed analysis, mountains of data, and calls to specific action—all while trying to balance both free and responsible speech with paradigms that looked beyond the United States' model.

Enlarge/ US Representative Katherine Clark (D-Mass.) appears at the first-ever South By Southwest Online Harassment Summit alongside New York Law School professor Ari Waldman (left) and Johns Creek, GA police sergeant BA Finley.

Sam Machkovech

“We represent ourselves as a target”

The day's highlight came courtesy of Rep. Katherine Clark (D-Mass.), who sponsored a Congressional bill in November that would criminalize the act of "swatting," or inciting police responses under false pretenses. That activity has spiked in recent years thanks to masked Internet telephony, and Clark was joined in her panel by someone with plenty of first-hand knowledge about the damage swatting can do: Sergeant BA Finley of the Johns Creek, Georgia police department.

Finley recalled a recent story in which a home in his jurisdiction was the target of a swatting attack—and its instigator turned out to be a British Columbia teenager who was subsequently convicted of 23 counts of swatting across the United States and Canada. Finley joined that teen's pursuit after responding to a false report of a woman and two children having been murdered in the home, and he described that account at length—including meeting the parents in question and describing "the fear and panic" he saw on their faces.

Finley next confirmed work on other swatting cases, two of which have since resulted in convictions. The officer said he stood with Clark on her work to broaden local police forces' access to better tools to fight such Internet-enabled crimes.

"When we speak against [online harassment] and try to make change on it, we represent ourselves as a target," Finley told the crowd. "But someone has to do it. We’re not going to take any more of it. I’m going to find you and I’m going to stop you. It’s more than a prank. It’s more than a joke."

That work doesn't just include November's Internet Swatting Hoax Act. Clark told the crowd she would soon introduce another bill in Congress with similar inspirations but potentially more targeted results. In a call to The Verge later in the day, Clark described the proposed legislation, called the Cybercrime Enforcement Training Assistance Act. The initiative includes a $20 million annual federal grant for state and local law enforcement training "in identifying and prosecuting cybercrimes," according to the report. The bill will also put money toward interstate cybercriminal extradition.

As described by Clark at SXSW, the act will do this by establishing a "nationwide resource center" to educate police departments about rapidly changing online systems on which crimes can occur. Local departments will then apply for a "competitive grant program" to fund training and resources in the sector.

Both Clark and Finley complained at length about their colleagues misunderstanding of how abuse and threats can be sent through the Internet and have a dramatic impact. Finley admitted he's still overwhelmed by "some type of new social media thing always coming out, a list as long as your arm," and sometimes he doesn't understanding his own 17-year-old daughter's talk about the subject. Still, the officer's level of discomfort is nothing compared to the misunderstanding he's seen among lawmakers and other police officials. Finley described at length the kind of training regimen he would advise an average police department to undertake in terms of helping officers to use new protocols to gobble up as much evidence as they can.

"How'd [the victim] interact? Call of Duty? World of Warcraft? Was there a username? A handle? An avatar? Whatever," Finley said. He then offered a no-nonsense way to explain to officers why they should care about Internet crime. "The Internet’s not going away, if you haven't figured that out. Not too many people rob banks anymore; I can steal more money in 30 minutes on my laptop without calling out things like helicopters."

After Clark recalled her own recent swatting story, she admitted one of the biggest educational gaps to address is among her Congressional colleagues, who "look at me when I use terms like 'swatting' and 'doxing' like I’ve lost my mind." Clark compared their dismissive responses to years of legislative silence about how police should respond to issues of domestic violence. To paraphrase their responses, Clark said, "This is an online problem. We really can’t do anything about it, it happens out there on the Internet, we don’t know how to address that, to deal with something that isn’t potentially imminent."

Further Reading

Clark vehemently rejects that logic, as it's the same type of response she saw in a judge's call to Zoe Quinn that she "just needed to get offline." The representative said she wanted to "make sure [lawmakers] understand the seriousness of what can occur, who it impacts. It's not just a sense of emotional well-being and physical safety but an economic component—we use the Internet to conduct our professional lives!"

The long panel conversation allowed its participants to clarify points often left behind in other stories on the topic. For example, Finley mentioned that he worries about swatting attacks that target those who have posted online comments critical of authority or the government or about being avid gun owners—saying that those could trigger false positives when police choose to send SWAT-level forces to respond to an anonymous threat. (Panel host and New York Law School professor Ari Waldman added that people of color and members of the LGBT community face additional reporting hurdles already, let alone the challenges they face when police departments don't understand online issues.) Finley also went on a lengthy aside complaining about voice-masking apps that have been used, saying that one swatting case he investigated was called in with "the Life Alert lady, creepy in its cheeriness." Meanwhile, Clark confirmed that she wanted federal laws to neither under-prosecute nor over-prosecute charges related to swatting. Current laws can go so far as to classify swatting as terrorism.